Category:Lapindo

From WikiLeaks

The Lapindo mud also called Sidoarjo mud flow, also informally abbreviated as Lusi, is a mud volcano in the subdistrict of Porong, Sidoarjo in East Java, Indonesia that has been ongoing since May 2006. Approximately 30,000 m³ (1 million cubic feet) of mud — equivalent to the contents of a dozen Olympic-size swimming pools — are expelled per day. It is expected that the flow will continue for the next 30 years. Although the Sidoarjo mud flow has been contained by levees since November 2008, resultant flooding regularly disrupts local highways and villages. Further breakouts of mud are still possible.

On May 28, 2006, PT Lapindo Brantas targeted gas in the Kujung Formation carbonates in the Brantas PSC area by drilling a borehole named the 'Banjar-Panji 1 exploration well'. Successive drillings led to a sequence of events, that most likely caused the mud eruption.

According to PT Lapindo Brantas it was a May 2006 earthquake that triggered the mud flow eruption, and not their drilling activities. Two days before the mud eruption, an earthquake of moment magnitude 6.3 hit the south coast of Central Java and Yogyakarta provinces killing 6,234 people and leaving 1.5 million homeless. At a hearing before the parliamentary members, senior executives of PT Lapindo Brantas argued that the earthquake was so powerful that it had created deep underground faults, allowing the mud to flow thousands of meters away, and that their company presence was coincidental, which should exempt them from paying compensation damage to the victims.

If the cause of the incident is determined to be natural, then the government of Indonesia has the responsibility to cover the damage instead.
This argument was also recurrently echoed by Aburizal Bakrie, the Indonesian Minister of Welfare at that time, whose family firm controls the
operator company PT Lapindo Brantas.

UK geologists downplayed Lapindo's argument and concluded that the earthquake was merely coincidental. While it could have generated a new fracture system and weakened strata surrounding the Banjar-Panji 1 well, it could not have been the cause of the formation of the hydraulic fracture that created the main vent 200 m (660 ft) away from the borehole. Additionally there was no other mud volcano reported on Java after the earthquake and the main drilling site is 300 km (190 mi) away from the earthquake's epicenter. The intensity of the earthquake at the drilling site was estimated to have been only magnitude 2 on Richter scale, the same effect as of a heavy truck passing over the area.

In June 2008, a report released by British, American, Indonesian, and Australian scientists concluded that the volcano was not a natural disaster, but the result of oil and gas drilling.